Artist-run galleries in Australia in the ’70s and ’80s defined themselves
as outside the conservative cultural structure. In the ’90s, artists’ spaces
like Melbourne’s 1st Floor Gallery manage projects as if they were small businesses,
with a high profile usually reserved for commercial galleries.

Allison Ritch: What is your relationship to the history of artist-run
spaces in Australia?

Lyndal Walker: From the mid-’70s and into the late ’70s and early ’80s,
the number of artist-run spaces increased, the most notable being Art Projects,
a Melbourne-based gallery. The creation of new spaces became quite intense toward
the beginning of the ’90s with projects such as Store 5, also in Melbourne.
1st Floor has come about since then—there is now a large proliferation of artist-run
spaces in Melbourne and to a lesser extent in Sydney.

David Rosetzky: 1st Floor started in 1994. I initiated it at that stage
with a group of peers that I’d studied with. We started meeting to discuss the
possibility of an artist-run gallery as a forum for continuing our practice
outside the institution. We were inspired by Store 5 and their idea of having
a space in close proximity to the art school.

AR: 1st Floor is an artists’ and writers’ collaborative project: in
addition to solo exhibitions, group shows like "Global Housewarming,"
and overseas exchanges, you sponsor publication projects. How did this evolve?

LW: Over the time that we’ve been established the writers have become
involved in day-to-day decisions, like initiating projects, and now there is
little distinction between the writers and the artists in the way that we operate.

AR: Has the writing component taken the 1st Floor project further in
that you have your own mythmaking machine?

DR: I think it did take it further in that people paid attention to
us as we were different. It was indeed a writers’ project as well, a new extension
of artist-run spaces.

LW: Also the writers with 1st Floor were on to what we were doing in
a way that an older writer wouldn’t have been.

DR: We are all from the same generation so we understand each other’s
aims.

AR: Your work questions existence in an over-designed present where
identity is pre-packaged, generic, and manufactured. However, I would suggest
that you’re looking for the human in this terrain and finding it?

DR: In Society Lite I’m trying to mimic the advertising campaigns of
Calvin Klein or Hugo Boss, who present a "real life" aesthetic to
sell us clothes. Society Lite refers to constructions of identity, but also
to the relationship between the artist, model, and viewer. The idea of manufactured
identity is ruptured because people locally are familiar with the models. Society
Lite addresses the negotiation of these different levels of perception.

AR: You curated the show, "Soldiers of Fashion." Why have
you chosen fashion as a way to discuss identity?

LW: I document current themes. Style is interesting because it dates.
It changes every six months and is commercially driven. There is a sense of
urgency to "Buy Now," and "Last Few Days," and fashion is
a good example of this urgency. The way that fashion plays with identity is
such a significant aspect of fashion. One day you can be a school girl and the
next day you can be a prostitute, and fashion lets you do that.

David Rosetsky Aquamarine, 1996.
Mixed media, detail of installation.

AR: In 1990’s Share Household Living Room, (1996) you historically index
grunge as a style, again pointing to the constructed nature of all culture,
including subcultures.

LW: My interest in share households is that it’s possible to subvert
some of these consumerist issues; mainly because the standard shared household
is occupied by people who don’t have a lot of money. The chair you’ve pulled
out of the dump the week before falls apart and you have to find another one.
Also it isn’t as if you can consider that I’ll buy the latest sort of can opener
that you want this week.

AR: What is your interest in the retro-aesthetic?

LW: My interest has been that it came up as a fashion and as an important
stylistic influence for the mid- to late ’90s and then there are related interests
such as why is this so.

AR: Is the retro-aesthetic based in an anti-aesthetic?

DR: No, it’s extremely aestheticized. It’s the anti-aesthetic aesthetic.
Retro is now a dominant style and it’s interesting in terms of the idea of a
return, a rereading of the past, and that is related to my interest in analysis
in my work; where people are always thrashing out the past, they’re stuck in
the past. Retro is a style which represents that.

LW: We can never look like it’s 1975 again. I think retro is quite nihilistic,
or certainly quite hopeless, because we do just take on the look of it. You
can’t relive the past, it happened—you might be able to wear the outfits the
way they were worn in the past but it ends somewhere there. I document people
in the ’90s wearing ’70s clothing so you begin to lose meaning because those
things occurred at the time for very specific reasons. For those styles to come
back again all at once or all in very quick succession sucks away the meaning.

AR: Is fashion a dictatorial world?

LW: Mainstream fashion is; but I’m more interested in subcultures and
the way that they emerge. I think that this is an aspect of hope within the
system that they do still emerge. Although they do get swallowed up by mainstream
fashion, they still happen on an organic level where people are making a protest
in one way or another.

AR: David, you were in two recent surveys of younger artists, the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Sydney’s "Primavera" and the Moët and
Chandon exhibition. Can you talk about your work for "Primavera,"
in particular?

DR: That was a large installation formed by the conflation of different
spaces. They represent environments such as a corporate foyer, a waiting room,
or doctor’s office.

AR: They have a mourning quality.

DR: That is inherent in the work. These spaces are tragic but they attempt
to be superficially beautiful as well. In Aquamarine for example—aquariums are
used for their relaxing qualities in waiting rooms. You could be waiting for
surgery or to see a psychiatrist to discuss disasters or tragedies in your life.

AR: What is the tragedy of these spaces?

DR: In Seating Arrangement, for example, I wanted to create an over-designed
environment. It was two-toned blue and two-toned beige. Also in this installation
is a video titled Foreplay where a darker and lighter bear also create the idea
of decor, of using nature and animals to discuss a total aestheticization of
life, in which nature has become another form of decor. These works refer to
an over-designed and over-constructed environment that is oppressive. Luke is
a portrait of a friend havingn a facial—the tape runs for 45 minutes, so it’s
banal in the same way as Discreet, in which taped psychoanalytic sessions are
played. These works look at forms of therapy, in terms of society’s massive
desire to acquire perfection.

AR: Are our desires to be perfect futile?

DR: Well, I’ll keep trying!

AR: Are the tapes real?

DR: They sound real and people got quite upset. They question psychotherapy
and its code of ethics, which is so often broken.

AR: The conflation of different spaces, such as the corporate space
or doctor’s office, was about bringing the real into the gallery. So, if the
real is in the gallery then is the gallery normal? Are objects recontextualized
within the gallery space or not; and has the separation between the gallery
and the outside world collapsed?

DR: I think it would be arrogant to say that we thought we were part
of this collapsing of the distinctions between art and real life. Though I think
that we’re doing it in our small culture which we’re involved in, in the Melbourne
scene amongst our peers.

LW: I definitely think reality is ephemeral and I think that the way
that you get real is to document it and then you can keep it. As with 1990s
Share Household Living Room, these works are full of Coke cans and Face magazines
and all that…but it is still where you live—it is still to some extent beyond
advertising and beyond....